Abilene experts, legislators weigh in on Internet piracy legislation

To Abilene Christian University computer science professor Brian Burton, proposed legislation such as the Stop Piracy Online Act (SOPA) is like applying a sledgehammer to a problem that requires the finesse of a screwdriver.

"Too much control is being given to too many different people as to what can be published to the Internet," Burton said of the legislation, born in the U.S. House, and a Senate counterpart, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect IP, or more popularly, PIPA).

The two bills have similar goals. Both pieces of legislation target "rogue" websites overseas that host illegal downloads of movies, music and other digital content, with a goal of eliminating access to such sites.

But both bills, too, have similar critics, who argue that the laws could curtail innovation and creativity on the Internet while also potentially threatening security and free speech.

SOPA in particular has earned the ire of many, including prominent sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit, which plan to "go dark" as a form of protest today against the legislation.

To Burton, bills such as SOPA represent a tendency to "legislate, rather than innovate" by traditional media companies, many of whom have not kept up with online demand for digital content.

"All you have to do is look and see who's for it and who's against it," he said. "Everyone who is pro-social media is against this legislation. Everybody that's for it, they're concerned about losing money because someone downloaded a movie or something like that."

U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer, who represents Abilene, on Tuesday said that the debate boils down to two issues "that we need to find a fair balance between."

But at the same time, "we need to be very careful to avoid government censorship in order to protect the free speech rights of every American and ensure the openness and competitiveness of the Internet," Neugebauer said.

"The open nature of the Internet is crucial to American innovation and growth," he said.

SOPA, as originally proposed in October 2011 by Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, championed giving copyright holders and the federal government authority to cut access to foreign sites deemed to be hosting pirated materials, effectively blacklisting them by removing them from what is called the Domain Name System.

Removing the sites from DNS, often compared to a phone book for the Internet, would effectively make then invisible.

Other sites, such as payment site PayPal, would not be able to send funds to sites that had been flagged under the legislation.

Smith has since backed off on DNS blocking so that issues surrounding that part of the legislation can be examined.

But SOPA could also require Internet providers to monitor customers' traffic and block sites suspected of copyright infringement.

And some critics, such as Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, even argue the bill is unconstitutional. A website containing tens of thousands of Web pages could be targeted if even only a single page contains potentially infringing materials, he recently wrote.

The bill's U.S. Senate counterpart, PIPA, is scheduled for a vote Tuesday, though again there are those who have asked for a delay — including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who represents Abilene.

A letter signed by several senators, including Cornyn, said legislators have "increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders" with vocal concerns about unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including "breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights."

"Before we do anything wrong, we need to slow down, we need to listen," Cornyn said Tuesday.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said SOPA will not be voted on in committee in its current form, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, one of PIPA's supporters, has said that the issues raised by the bills perhaps deserve more study.

Alternative legislation, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN), has been proposed.

"It is important that we carefully weigh the impacts of all of these proposals," Neugebauer said, who noted that SOPA has undergone significant changes since the original version was introduced in October.

The Obama administration recently released a statement on SOPA/PIPA, saying that while it believes online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem, "any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation."

In particular, proposed laws must not "tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System," which the statement termed a "foundation of Internet security."